In recessions and other times of hardship, it is not unusual for many people to fall victim of confidence scams and tricks as they struggle to make ends meet. An unfortunate consequence of the recession is that many con men take advantage of those who have been laid off or had their salary cut by offering them deals which are too good to be true. One of the most common methods of tricking people in this manner is to offer them potential employment, ideally from home, by promising work and pay which will never come. These so-called "Start Up Scams," referring to the fact that the victim must "start up" a business which is built to fail, tend to be easy to spot when one knows what to look for.

The first and most obvious sign of a start-up scam is that a person is required to pay a fee, which is often several hundred pounds, in order to purchase saleable product and instruction manuals. In general, the product is of inferior quality or may in fact not be legal to sell at all. Sometimes it never even arrives. Since no legitimate employer would require a potential employee to hand in their own cash in order to get products to sell, asking for money up front is generally the easiest way to spot a start up scam, and the smarter con-artists no longer use it.

More often these scammers now go after those who have good ideas but lack the corporate contacts and industry knowledge to put them to use. They hawk their services to those who wish to begin a business, promising they will get investment capital from major corporations or even the British government. In exchange for a large fee, they claim they will hook the victim up with these services, even going so far as to offer to speed up or conduct the patenting application on new inventions. These men are known as "rainmakers" since they offer to make the money "rain down" in exchange for a fee, and always have an excuse requiring more money when the funding fails to arrive.

There are also persons who dupe potential small business owners and work-at-home freelancers by offering up seminars and books which promise to help them improve their business. If these books provide any useful information at all, it is generally of the sort that can be found for free on the Internet or in any library. These seminars may cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, and generally cause more harm to one’s business prospects than doing nothing at all. Any seminar or book that purports to offer "business secrets" should be avoided.